As REBOL has been referenced several time on OSNews, I thought that some here may be interested to know that its author has announced that REBOL will be open-sourced. The R3 source code will most likely be released under the GPLv2 license.

yes, the problem is, this comes about 5 years too late.
Rebol delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed, till they want now to make it open source... since otherwise it will delay even more.
Now it will take time till R3 will be released officially, till it will become stable, and then someone need to port it to syllable. Porting the GUI part, will be a problem, since this will need some own work from the syllable "team" (what team, in fact, but let's call it team). And this will very very very likey never ever happen. The natie GUI in syllable (the api) has itself lots of bugs and problems, that nobody touched since many years, and so dont exact that someone will port the gui part of rebol to syllable.
It's more likely that someone will port it to haiku as a GSoC project. And perhaps based on that work one could start porting it to syllable, but even that variant is very very unlikely.

Cipri - I got used to you to spoil every possible Syllable related news post :-), but man - why to spoil the news, which is REBOL only related?

Also - I really don't care about what you or other ppl, not using REBOL in the past, think about the open-sourcing activity coming too late. Simply put - there are some ppl out there, who depend on REBOL based solutions, and to those ppl, it is important message.

However, as Henrik states - Red/System is done, Red itself materialises day by day. In January, we will probably see alpha release, which spans even Android, where R3 never landed. So - the only thing you might ask is - why yet another programming language? You know, that question exists for ages with no satisfactory answer :-)

The time has come for REBOL to be released as open source. This is the only way I can see it regaining some degree of momentum and renewed interest -- not just within our REBOL community, but for many yet-to-be users who possess the curiosity or motivation to learn new and powerful programming concepts and techniques.

Can only agree. Rebol has been around for how long? 15 years maybe? Does anybody care if it is open sourced by now? I really can't remember the details of Rebol but I know I've had a look at it more than once and never found anything that looked even remotely interesting our outstanding to me.

Even though not many use it, some people depend on it for their daily job, including me, and REBOL3's development is currently at a dead end.

Open sourcing it is something that has been requested for a long, long time, due to a slower and slower development pace and it will be deeply appreciated to finally get the bugs fixed and see some movement again.

However, while it's getting open sourced now, the open source alternative Red is gaining momentum and is being developed intensely at a much faster pace than REBOL3 ever was.

I expect there will be some competition between the two until one of them finally takes over, which I expect will be Red.